Dirt Music

A tall, gangly man in a white shirt and black pants, was opening channels along the rows with his bare feet so that a trickle of water could flow across the field.

The driver was a lunatic. I won’t go into the details…but fuck me, what an idiot! It had all begun happily enough. I’d decided to catch a bus up to Warud, two hours north of Nagpur. I wanted to walk among the orange groves the town is famous for and wander at random in the countryside. So I walked up to the Nagpur bus station and climbed aboard the Warud bus, which, conveniently, happened to be sitting in the compound waiting to depart.

The ticket wallah invited me to sit in the “special seat” right up front beside the driver. I could see through the floor and there were no seat belts but, hey, I thought, this will give me a great view of the journey. As we set off out through the crowded city streets, I began jotting notes in my diary:

Children in white marching on a dirt square.

A walled forest

A cow with a necklace of flowers

A white Hindu temple stupa like a wedding cake.

My diary continues: “very soon after I began jotting down these vignettes the driver went berserk. I won’t describe it…a total lunatic, a reckless disregard for the safety of his passengers.” It was insane: weaving back and forth across the highway, passing on blind corners and into the face of oncoming traffic, speeding. I kept thinking of a newspaper headline I’d read that morning about a bust crash that had killed 48 people: “DRIVER WAS BEHAVING RECKLESSLY.” I got off at the first town we stopped in and swore that I would never ride a bus in India again.

Yerla

And then I heard the Dirt Music.

I had walked out of town. Google Maps told me that it would take four hours to walk back to Nagpur. It was a warm, sunny day. I could cope with a walk like that. After leaping from the bus in a deserted compound (I’d said “get fucked you idiot” when the driver objected) I had Face-timed home, figured out where I was, had a cold Coke to settle my jangling nerves, and wandered through the town’s back streets, stared at like I was from an alien planet.

Dirt Music

On the scruffy edge of the town – it was called Yerla – the road crossed a short bridge spanning a small, half-dry river where a thin stream of stagnant water curled along a bed of fine red sand. Beyond it, the gates of a temple compound were decorated with gaily-painted reliefs of Hindu deities stood beneath the shady fronds of palm trees. A little further on, a rusty gate swung from a weathered timber post opened onto a field of brassicas. There was a group of brightly-dressed women squatted down in the centre of the field pulling weeds. A tall, gangly man in a white shirt and black pants, was opening channels along the rows with his bare feet so that a trickle of water could flow across the field.

A red-dirt track led from the gateway towards a dilapidated building: half house, half barn. There were some bullocks tethered beside the building. On the track, halfway between the gate and the house, two men, one astride a motorbike, were talking. I approached them and introduced myself. They seemed understandably perplexed at this European stranger who had walked in off the road but as I explained, with gestures and sign language, that I was interested in the crop growing beside us, they relaxed. The man on the motorbike, who spoke a little English, told me the other man was the farmer who owned the land and that the crop was cauliflower plants.

The farmer agreed to show me the crop and guided me along one of the rows to the group of women. They were chattering away as they worked, pulling out weed that looked to me like fathen (Chenopodium album), considered a weed in most crops but sometimes cultivated as a feed crop for chickens. The women seemed uninterested in me and carried on with their work.

I squatted down with the farmer as he examined some of the cauliflower plants. They were healthy and pest free and were growing exceedingly well in the rich, red, crumbly soil. I left the farmer to his work and walked along the narrow path bordering the field towards a dwelling of some sort. However a barking dog rushed out of the compound towards me so I turned and walked back to the first building I’d seen and photographed a wooden plough standing upright in the soil beside the tethered bullocks.

Then, with the dog still yapping and snarling at me from a distance, I ambled back out to the gate and sat under a tree for a while. Across the road, a pair of bullocks dragged another timber plough, with the ploughman balanced atop, through the soil of a small field. A couple of men had a stall set up under the banyan trees nearby, selling tomatoes, fresh vegetables and pyramids of greenish oranges.

The gangly man was still working his way down the rows of cauliflowers, pushing the soil with his feet to allow the silver trickles of life-giving water to flow. Snow-white egrets followed the water, picking up worms and mollusks the water brought to the surface. I thought: “What a great job on a hot day, playing around in water and soil with cool mud between your toes and everything working in harmony.”

I still had a long way to go and I wasn’t sure how or when I would be able to find my way back to Nagpur. But I could worry about that later. For now I was happy just to sit there in the shade, watching this tiny pageant of rural Indian life and listening to the dirt music.